I’m a relative newcomer to UH Hilo but have already made it my home. After growing up in Texas and Kansas, attending college and grad school in California, Pennsylvania, and Germany, I just joined the faculty at UH Hilo in Fall 2011 to teach the department’s history of philosophy sequence (PHIL 211 and PHIL 213). My primary research interests are in German idealism and the ethics of recognition, and I have just completed a book on intimacy. (http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/intimacy-9781474226264/) Addressing such dimensions as gift-giving, physical touch, fetishes, irony, and mourning, the book argues that every demand for intimacy is contradictory in its very structure and yet that we should not relax into the deconstructive position that intimacy as such is impossible. The book draws widely on the philosophical tradition with a particular focus on recent French and German philosophy and also borrows some important insights from work in psychology, economics, anthropology, and sociology. My publishers won’t let me post copies of the articles listed below, but if any sound interesting, feel free to email me, and I’ll promise never to check back to see if you’ve actually read them.

Pictured above with me are my wife Quyen, son Clancy, and daughter Iris. They’re the cute ones, and I’m the one who can’t keep his hands to himself.

Brief CV:

Education:

B.A. in Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, 2001

DAAD Scholar, Freiburg (Germany), 2004-5

PhD in Philosophy, Penn State University, 2007

Books

Intimacy: A Dialectical Study London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling, London: Continuum Press, 2010.

Articles

"Confronting the Anthropocene: Schelling and Lucretius on Receiving Nature's Gift," forthcoming in Comparative and Continental Philosophy.

“Schelling’s Unfinished Dialogue: Reason and Personality in the Letter to Eschenmayer,” in Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, edited by Jason Wirth (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 197-208.

“States of Peace: Ricoeur on Recognition and the Gift,” in From Ricoeur to Action, edited by Todd Mei and David Lewin (London: Continuum, 2012), 175-191.

“Affirmative Pathology: Spinoza and Hegel on Illness and Self-Repair,” in Between Hegel and Spinoza: A Volume of Critical Essays, edited by Hasana Sharp and Jason E. Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 133-150.

“Multivalent Recognition: The Place of Hegel in the Fraser-Honneth Debate,” Contemporary Political Theory, 11: 1 (2012), 23-40.

“Sovereign Gratitude: Hegel on Religion and the Gift,” Research in Phenomenology, 41: 3 (2011), 374-395.